A recent article in “The Week” magazine (Nov. 22) is frightening. It’s about the rise of drug-resistant bacteria.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are three “nightmare superbugs” that pose an urgent risk to the health of Americans. One is C. difficile, an infection that causes diarrhea and is often fatal. The second is a bloodstream infection. Half the people it infects end up dying.

The third is a form of gonorrhea that has become resistant to all drugs and can even enter the brain. “Super gonorrhea,” according to the magazine, raises “the prospect of a sexually transmitted global epidemic.”

Tea party activists seem to think the main problems facing the country are taxes and “big government.” But looming on the horizon are threats to our very survival. Back in 1945 Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “There is the danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to nonlethal quantities of the drug make them resistant.”

And that’s exactly what’s happened. The CDC estimates that at least half of human antibiotic use is unnecessary, prescribed by doctors simply because their patients demand it. Evolution allows resistant bacteria to survive and multiply when a particular type of antibiotic is used over and over. These bacteria kill 23,000 Americans per year and cost $20 billion to the U.S. health care system.

Another very important cause of the development of drug-resistant bacteria is the increase of factory farms. Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are fed to farm animals, exposing huge amounts of bacteria to antibiotics.

Responsible people have long been against these mega-farms, and not only because of animal cruelty. Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, also contaminate the water supply. An even greater danger is their over-use of antibiotics, which results in the superbugs that, according to CDC Director Tom Frieden, is bringing us “closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.”

A large problem is that pharmaceutical companies do not create new antibiotics, which require billions of dollars to develop. Since most people take them for just a short time, diabetic and other chronic disease medicines, which people take for their entire lives, result in much bigger profits. A new antibiotic, if one includes the cost of research and development, actually loses $50 million.

What can be done? First of all, doctors should stop prescribing antibiotics to patients who do not need them. People who are using antibiotics should follow the directions to completely finish the dosage, even though they may feel better and want to stop. By quitting early, they may not kill off all the bacteria, and the tougher microbes can spread.

Page 2 of 2 - Americans should demand that animals not be given huge doses of antibiotics just to keep them alive in an over-crowded habitat. The European Union has already banned feeding animals antibiotics that are useful for human health. The U.S. should follow suit. And as consumers, we should be careful to buy only meat from animals that have not been fed antibiotics. Also, we need to somehow make it profitable for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotics. Perhaps grants or subsidies for research, or tax credits to help cover costs could be viable.

But nothing will work unless farmers stop pumping animals full of antibiotics. Otherwise new drug-resistant pathogens will multiply as fast as we can develop ways to kill them. We must stop concentrating on profit and start thinking of succeeding generations. In a post-antibiotic world, says World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan, we could see “the end of modern medicine as we know it.”

Chuck and Pat Wemstrom live in rural Mount Carroll. They can be reached at patandchuck@gmail.com.